“All my credibility is on the line. You can’t kill this thing. It’s in motion. It’s going to happen,” Conway said.
“It’s not going to happen,” Bannon said. “He ain’t going to do it. If he does do an introduction,” Bannon continued, “you can’t have him do a live interview. He’ll fucking get cut to pieces.” The apology road was not Trump, and if he was questioned afterward he would backtrack and contradict himself.
They tried to reword it.
Trump went through two lines.
“I’m not doing this.”
The glass in Trump Tower was thick, but they could hear the roaring crowd of Trump supporters in the street—a riot of “deplorables,” who had adopted Hillary Clinton’s derisive term as their own.
“My people!” Trump declared. “I’m going to go down. Don’t worry about the rally. I’m going to do it right here.”
“You’re not going down there,” a Secret Service agent insisted. “You’re not going outside.”
“I’m going downstairs,” Trump said. He headed out. “This is great.”
Conway tried to intervene. “You just can’t cancel” on ABC.
“I don’t care. I’m never doing this. It was a dumb idea. I never wanted to do it.”
Bannon was about to follow Trump into the elevator when Christie said, “Hang on for a second.”
He stayed back as Trump went downstairs with Conway, Don Jr. and the Secret Service.
“You’re the fucking problem,” Christie said to Bannon. “You’ve been the problem since the beginning.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re the enabler. You play to every one of his worst instincts. This thing’s over, and you’re going to be blamed. Every time he’s got terrible instincts for these things, and all you do is get him all worked up. This is going to be humiliating.”
Christie was in Bannon’s face, looming large. Bannon half-wanted to say, You fat fuck, let’s throw down right here.
“Governor,” he replied instead, “the plane leaves tomorrow.” They were heading to St. Louis for the second presidential debate. “If you’re on the plane, you’re on the team.”
Downstairs, the Secret Service relented. Trump could go out on the street, but only briefly. There could be weapons all over the place. It was a baying mob of supporters and protesters.
At 4:30 p.m. Trump stepped out, giving high fives and shaking hands for a few minutes, flanked by the Secret Service and New York police.
Will you stay in the race? a reporter asked.
“One hundred percent,” Trump said.
* * *
Everyone on the Trump campaign refused to appear on the Sunday-morning talk shows except Rudy Giuliani. Priebus, Christie, even the reliable, thick-armored, never-say-no Conway had been scheduled. All canceled.
Giuliani appeared on all five, completing what is called a full Ginsburg—a term in honor of William H. Ginsburg, the attorney for Monica Lewinsky, who appeared on all five network Sunday programs on February 1, 1998.
Giuliani gave, or tried to give, the same spiel on each show: Trump’s words had been “reprehensible and terrible and awful,” and he had apologized. Trump was not the same man now that he had been when captured on tape in 2005. The “transformational” presidential campaign had made him a changed man. And besides, Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs, which had come out in WikiLeaks’s release of John Podesta’s emails, revealed a private coziness with Wall Street that clashed with her liberal public positions. The country would view that much more harshly.
Bannon, not a regular viewer of Sunday talk shows, tuned in. The morning was a brutal slog. When CNN’s Jake Tapper said Trump’s words had been a depiction of sexual assault that was “really offensive on just a basic human level,” Giuliani had to acknowledge, “Yes, it is.”
Giuliani was exhausted, practically bled out, but he had proved his devotion and friendship. He had pulled out every stop, leaning frequently and heavily on his Catholicism: “You confess your sins and you make a firm resolution not to commit that sin again. And then, the priest gives you absolution and then, hopefully you’re a changed person. I mean, we believe the people in this country can change.”
Giuliani, seeming punch-drunk, made it to the plane for the departure to the St. Louis debate. He took a seat next to Trump, who was at his table in his reading glasses. He peered over at the former mayor.
“Rudy, you’re a baby!” Trump said loudly. “I’ve never seen a worse defense of me in my life. They took your diaper off right there. You’re like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?”
Trump turned to the others, particularly Bannon.
“Why did you put him on? He can’t defend me. I need somebody to defend me. Where are my people?”
“What are you talking about?” Bannon asked. “This guy’s the only guy that went on.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Trump replied. “It was a mistake. He shouldn’t have gone on. He’s weak. You’re weak, Rudy. You’ve lost it.”
Giuliani just looked up, his face blank.
Shortly after the planned departure, Chris Christie had not appeared. “Fuck this guy,” Bannon said, and the plane took off.
CHAPTER
5
Giuliani had said twice, on CNN and NBC, that he did not anticipate Trump going after Bill Clinton or Hillary’s private life in the debate that evening. But Bannon had arranged what he thought would be a well-timed kill shot.
Four of the women who claimed Clinton had attacked them or who Hillary had tried to undermine would be at the debate, Bannon explained to Trump. They were Paula Jones, who said Clinton had exposed himself to her, and with whom Clinton had settled a sexual harassment suit, paying her $850,000; Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed Clinton had raped her; Kathleen Willey, who alleged that Clinton sexually assaulted her in the White House; and Kathy Shelton, who, when she was 12, alleged that Hillary had smeared her while defending her client, who allegedly had raped Shelton.
It was an Oscar list from Clinton’s past, triggering memories of his steamy Arkansas and White House years.
Prior to the debate, Bannon said, they would sit the four women at a table with Trump and invite in reporters.
“That fucking media, they think they’re going to come in for the end of debate prep. And we’re going to let them in the room and the women will be there. And we’ll just go live. Boom!”
Scorched-earth, just the way Bannon liked it.
Trump had been tweeting links to Breitbart stories about the Clinton accusers throughout the day.
“I like it,” Trump said, standing and looking imperial. “I like it!”
Just before 7:30 p.m., reporters entered the room at the St. Louis Four Seasons where Trump and the women were waiting. Bannon and Kushner stood in the back of the room, grinning.
At 7:26, Trump tweeted, “Join me on #FacebookLive as I conclude my final #debate preparations”—effectively live broadcasting events as CNN picked up his feed.
The women breathed fire into the microphones.
“Actions speak louder than words,” Juanita Broaddrick said. “Mr. Trump may have said some bad words, but Bill Clinton raped me, and Hillary Clinton threatened me.”
The debate organizers barred the Clinton accusers from sitting in the VIP family box right in front of the stage as Bannon had planned, so they walked in last and sat in the front row of the audience.
Early on, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the debate co-host, raised the Access Hollywood tape, saying, “That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”
Trump parried. “When we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads . . . where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over and you have so many bad things happening . . . yes, I am very embarrassed by it and I hate it, but it’s locker-room talk and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of ISIS.”